Recipe for Tracing the Fate of Issues and their Publics on the Web.
Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers
October 2004
1 . Taking to the Web , looking for ‘public deba te . ’
Now quite a few years back, we took to the Web to study public debates on
science and technology. But we found ‘issue-networks’ instead. Exploring the
ways in which controversies around techno-scientific issues, such as climate
change and genetically modified food, were being ‘done’ on the Web, we started
off by following hyperlinks among Web sites dealing with these issues. In doing
so, we first of all noted the great variety of formats in which the issue was being
presented on the Web, from ‘issue briefs,’ to ‘fact versus fiction’ pages, visual
and textual reports of in situ protests (such as the dump of genetically modified
grain in front of a government office in the Netherlands), online petitions, and
summaries for policy-makers. But as we surfed what we now call ‘issue-spaces,’
we increasingly came to rely on hyperlinks to delineate controversies around
techno-scientific issues on the Web. Following hyperlinks among pages dealing
with a given issue, we found that these links provided a means to demarcate the
network which could be said to be staging the constroversy in the new medium.
Those Web pages which treated the issue, and which received a significant
number of links from other pages presenting the affair, we decided, disclosed
the controversy on the Web. Thus, we came to focus on sets of inter-linked
pages which treated the affair in question, which we dubbed issue-networks, as
our most useful unit of analysis.
As we began locating and analysing issue-networks on the Web — first
manually and later aided by software —, our intuitions told us that it wasn’t
quite right to characterize the online activity around our issues (climate change,
and genetically modified food) as ‘public debate.’ For one, the Web pages that
made up the issue-network couldn’t really be said to be engaged in a ‘great
conversation’ : the relations among these pages were far too indirect to be able
to say that they were ‘speaking’ with one and another. Acknowledgements of
other sites, by way of hyperlinks, characteristically are one way recognitions,
whereby the sender of the link ‘frames’ the site of the receiver, as it presents
the link under a particular heading, or as part of an overview of the issue, news
item, protest report, or a review of a policy-event. Moreover, instead talking to
each other, the pages in the network were rather defining the issue in question
in ways that built from, and countered, issue-definitions presented on other
pages in the network. That is also to say, these pages weren’t exactly
presenting ‘points of view’ on the matter at hand, as happens in a debate : first
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and foremost, they presented the issue, what is was about, and what should be
done about it. Thus, we felt it necessary to acknowledge that we were looking
not so much at public debates, but at a different set of practices : that of
‘issues being done in networks,’ by a variety of techniques, ranging from the
action campaign to the release of policy documents, et cetera. So perhaps it
shouldn’t have surprised us that, when we finally looked up the term ‘issuenetwork’ in the scientific litterature, 1it turned out that this notion was originally
developed to describe, not the democratic practice of public debate, but new
forms of lobbyism.
2 . The questionable origins of the ‘issue-network. ’
The term ‘issue-network,’ we learned, came to prominence in the context of the
now classic 1970s critique of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The
notion was employed in its day, in particular, in order to question the extent to
which Washington, DC “beltway” ‘policy circles’ - think tanks, scientists and
activists as well as non-governmental organizations (working and networking on
the same issue) - were increasingly constraining legislative outcomes. The
American political scientist Hugh Heclo coined the “issue network” in 1978, in a
scholarly publication by the conservative American Enterprise Insitute. Its
purpose, Heclo stated in his seminal article, was to facilitate the analysis and
evaluation of a recent development (taking place under the democratic President
Carter) which Heclo characterized as ‘the broadening of organisational
participation in policy-making.’ More specifically, Heclo observed that, in
Washington government circles, increasingly ‘issue-activists,’ ‘issue-experts’ and
‘issue-watchers’ were forming ‘loose alliances’ in which they came to ‘define
public affairs by sharing information about them.’ Thus, Heclo’s critique did not
just foreground the presence and influence of ‘policy pressure groups’ but of
‘webs of them’ - indeed Heclo was the first to apply the notion of network in
the field of politics.2 The main problematic he highlighted was the rather classic
one of the undermining of the representative system of government. However,
the threat accordingly to him did not derive from the ‘influence’ of lobbyists on
the voting-behavior of politicians and decision-making by officials. The problem
was rather that the “issue-people” got to define political affairs, well before
government officials, politicians and the general public got involved. Besides this,
the critique of the issue-network was also caught up in the more general
modernist problem, according to which a reliance upon social networks, on ties
Hugh Heclo, "Issue networks and the Executive Establishment," in American Enterprise Institute, ed., The
New American Political System, Washington, D.C., 1978, pp. 87–124.
2 Wayne Parsons, Public Policy, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1997, p. 77
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of kinship, and the informal, should not be made triumphant over formal political
relations, and the properly bureaucratic.3
A Heclo-ian critique of issue-networking continues to find expression
today in both highly politicized as well as more scholarly discussions about NGO
influence on, and involvement in, decision- and policy-making. These days, the
American Enterprise Institute maintains the Web site http://www.ngowatch.org/
which provides detailed information on American progressive NGO’s, from their
adress to a listing of initiatives, leadership structure and annual revenue. Its
stated purpose is to “bring clarity and accountability to the burgeoning world of
NGO’s.” 4 Commenting on this project, the spokesperson for social movements
against corporate globalization, Noami Klein, scandalizes the critique of wellmeaning NGOs that this sites makes. She quotes the site’s claim that “the
extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential
to undermine the sovereignity of constitutional democracies,” and asks since
when the idea of “citizens getting together to try and influence their
government” is considered a sinister idea. She wonders whether the critique of
NGO’s that the site makes, does not rather apply to the conservative think tank
itself, obeserving that “as for influence, few peddle it like the AEI.” 5
Also in Europe, such criticisms of the lack of legitimacy of NGOs return
time and again in both popular and scholarly debates. The Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom employed the language of ‘democratic illegitimacy’ when asked
about protest groups at the Genoa G8 Summit in 2001, pointing out to the
assembled press at the Genoa airport that ‘the Britisch people are back home’;
In Dutch discussions about the role of environmental organizations in public
debates, the discursive and debating ‘styles’ of NGO’s have been widely
questioned. As part of these discussions, spectacular actions (banner hangings
and digital witnessing of baby seal bludgeoning), overblown claims (Greenpeace’s
Brent Spar oil calculation mistake), tactically ‘going to the press,’ and the
departure from formal settings to ‘counter-settings’ (as when Dutch NGO’s
working on the issue of food safety left the Dutch debate for the European
debate, conducted in Brussels) have been highlighted as ‘out of order.’6
The issue-network critique of the 1970s, and contemporary criticisms of
NGOs, can be said to revolve around three claims : issue-based groupings fail to
represent the public, they are unaccountable to the public, and perhaps most
Paul du Gay, In Praise of Bureaucracy, Sage, London, 2000.
http://www.ngowatch.org/info.htm
5 Naomi Klein, “Bush to NGOs: Watch your mouths,” Globe and Mail, June 20, 2003
6 Rein de Wilde, Niki Vermeulen, Mirko Reithler, Bezeten van Genen, Een essay over de innovatieoorlog rondom genetisch
gemodificeerd voedsel, (Possessed by Genes, An Essay on the Innovation War around Genetically Modified Food),
Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, Voorstudies en Achtergronden, SDU Uitgevers, Den Haag,
2003
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seriously, they undermine established arrangements for public participation in
politics. From the very beginning, issue-networks have are not only been
defined in opposition to the public, they have been criticized for attempting to
take the place of the public. Not only do these networks exert influence on
decision- and policy-making in the absence of the restraint brought about by
how things are done publicly and properly. They actually undermine the
possibility for public involvement in politics, by introducing opacity, complexity
and ready-made issue-definitions into the political process. Now of course these
claims themselves can be subjected to critical scrutiny. Among others, we can
question the allegiations of opacity and informality, which are ascribed to the
relations among NGO’s and between NGOs and government, and to there issuemaking practices. For one, these days NGO participation in decision- and policymaking is increasingly being codified, as accreditation mechanisms have put in
place by (inter-)governmental organisations. Also, the practices of NGO’s are
increasingly being public-ized, for instance on the World Wide Web. In that
respect, they have become legible to a degree, a point we’ll return to herebelow.
But perhaps most importantly, we may question the implicit or not so implicit
assumptions on which the critique of issue-networks relies, about what
constitutes proper public involvement in politics.
The Hecloian critique of issue-networks suggests that such public
involvement can be fully accounted for in terms of mechanisms for legitimacy
and accountability (such as elections and objective reporting by the press.) In
discrediting the involvement of unelected and unappointed agents in the
definition of the issues of politics and the formulation of policy, the critique
assumes that public involvement in politics can happen without this. In doing so,
we want to highlight here, the NGO critique leaves out of account that issues do
play a key role in getting publics involved and interested in politics. 7 Thus we
say, something else is required besides mechanisms of legitimacy and
accountability for publics to participate in politics : issues. Here we would like to
explore this aspect of public involvement in politics : the possibility that publics
are at least in part organised by issues, and indeed, by issue-networks. This is
the possibility we would like to explore, in our research on issue-networks on the
Web. Thus we ask, can the Web tell us whether and how publics are organised by
issue-networks over the course of an issue’s “life” ? And what bearings, if at all,
do these publics organised by issue-networks have, at particularly crucial
junctures, on the fate of the issue?
In taking up these questions, we recognize at the outset that not all
issues organise publics. But most publics, it seems to us, do care about issues.
The fate of issues in terms of how they come to be addressed in the architecture of public space is treated in
Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of the New Public Domain, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2001.
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Similarly, we acknowledge that accusations directed at NGOs of a lack of
legitimacy and accountability may or may not justified. But that does not mean
that public involvement in politics can be accounted for solely in terms of
mechanisms of legitimacy and accountability. Research on issue-networks on
the Web, provides a means to explore the role issues may play in getting ‘the
public’ involved in politics. As such, it may be of help in adressing some of the
shortcommings of our understanding of what counts as ‘proper’ public
involvement in politics, and what it requires.
3 . With the aid of Issue Crawler…
In taking to the Web to see whether and how issue-networks organise publics,
we make use of a particular piece of software, Issue Crawler. This is a Web-based
tool that was explicitly designed to perform the location of issue-networks. Issue
Crawler begins by following hyperlinks from a set of starting points, Web pages
provided by the user. It captures the outlinks from these pages, and keeps and
analyzes the outlinks that two or more or the starting points have in common.
Repeating the process several times, the results from each ‘co-link analysis’
provides the starting points for the next iteration. The choice of starting points
is covered elsewhere. 8 But where the point is to locate an issue-network, the
best starting points generally speaking are specific pages (link lists, preferably)
that broadly disclose the substantive parties to the issue. If these starting
points indeed disclose further Web pages that deal with the issue in question,
and if these pages are sufficiently interlinked, then Issue Crawler can be
expected to disclose an issue-network. In other cases, the crawler may find
social networks or, in the “worst” case, no network at all. We call a social
network a set of pages that acknowledge each other by way of hyperlinks, and
which may have several things in common, such as geographical location,
funding, political leaning, or the events in which they participate, et cetera, but
not an issue. When our co-link machine finds no network at all, one may give it a
second try, with a different set of starting points. But if there is no network
according to crawler, this may also mean that the issue under scrutiny is not an
issue, at least not according to the Web. In that case, Web pages dealing with
the issue are not acknowledging one and another by way of hyperlinks, and may
also in other ways fail to engage in collective practices of issue-making, on the
Web.
http://www.govcom.org/crawler_software.html See also : Richard Rogers and Andrés Zelman, “Surfing
for Knowledge in the Information Society,” in Greg Elmer, ed., Critical Perspectives on the Internet,
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2002, pp. 63-86. see also
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This brief discussion of the workings of Issue Crawler makes clear that
this tool principally relies, for the location of issue-networks, on the presence of
hyperlinks among Web pages that deal with the issue. Now it is certainly not the
case that the presence of such links can be taken as a sufficient indication that
issue-networking activity is indeed going on, in the sense attributed to it by
Hugh Heclo. Nor can the absence of an issue-network on the Web be taken as a
sufficient indication for a lack of networking around the issue in general. As we
saw herebove, Heclo defines issue-networking as the formation of loose alliances
among issue-activists, issue-experts, and issue-watchers, who define issues by
sharing information about them. It is obvious that many other techniques,
besides exchanging hyperlinks on the Web, are available for doing so. To give
one example, in an interview one of us did with the Web master of the DutchBritish oil company Shell, Simon May, he confirmed that Shell frequently
consults with Greenpeace. However, Greenpeace on its Web site does not
acknowledge Shell by way of a hyperlink (even if Shell does link to Greenpeace).
In this respect, we can say that hyperlinks among sites dealing with a common
issue may disclose an issue-network, but a network located by way of hyperlinks
does not reveal all the issue-networking practices that may be going on, on and
off the Web.
However, the fact that hyperlinks provide an extremely partial perspective
on issue-networking can also be seen as a key advantage, in as far we are
interested in the ways in which issue-networks may organise a public for a given
issue. The networks located on the Web by way of hyperlinks, disclose a
particular type of issue-network : a network that is in the business of publicizing the issue, and the network that supports it. The Web after all is a generally
accessible medium, where organisations and individuals direct themselves at a
potentially very broad audience. (Having said this, it is of course not so
surprising that we find in the issue-networks that we locate on the Web an
occasion to criticize Heclo for characterizing the issue-network as an a-public or
anti-public entity.) Thus we say that the sets of interlinking Web pages treating
a common issue, that we locate on the Web, provide a particular trace of a
particular mode of issue-networking : a generally accessible informational trace
of a network in the business of public-izing the issue, and the networks that
have adopted it.
4 . Recipes for tracing the fa te of issues, and their publics ?
For the purposes of our research on issue-networks on the Web, we rely on this
provisional definition of issue-network : a heterogenuous set of entities (actors,
documents, slogans, imagery) that have configured into a hyperlink-network
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around a common problematic, summed up in a key-word (such as climate
change, but below we’ll also discuss other examples such as the issues of the
Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, and the Narmada dams in Northern India). Once
such an issue-network has been located on the Web, with the aid of Issue
Crawler, the network may provide clues as to the state of the issue, and the
state of its public. When it comes to the state of the issue, one may begin by
querying the network looking for indications on these three counts : the
‘hotness’ of the issue, the life expectancy of the issue, and indeed, its fate. With
respect to ‘hotness’, one can ask : is the network active or passive? That is, are
the pages fresh or stale? How frequently are they updated? If the pages in the
network are old, the issue may already have been adressed, or, in a far more
tragic case, the issue may have been deserted by the actors that had previously
adopted it. As concerns life expectancy, a key question is : are more actors
attaching itself to the issue, or are actors detaching themselves from it? Are
more documents, slogans, and imagery being released to the network, or less?
Lastly when it comes to the issue’s fate, one may ask : has the network
identified an adress for the issue, an institution or collective that may take care
of it, such as the UN, consumers, or the Dutch government? And if this is the
case, has the adressee taken up the issue, or is the issue being denied adress?
When it comes to the public-ness of the issue, we already mentioned that
the presence of an issue-network on the Web can be seen as indicative of a
public-zing tendency of the network. Attempting to reverse engineer the
genealogy of issue-networks that we located on the Web, we have often
speculated on the type of issue-making events that take place in other (media)spaces than the Web, such as boardrooms and email-networks. The move onto
the Web of issue-networks may perhaps be understood as a ‘going public’ of
networks that have been busy organising in these other media-spaces : a
‘coming out’ of Hecloian issue-networks? However, the presence of issuenetworks on the Web does of course not necessarily mean that these networks
are indeed organising a public for the issue. How to determine whether this is
the case?
In previous work, we have proposed that research on issue-networks on
the Web may complicate and enrich our understanding of how more ‘classical
publics’ come about : a tv-public, a election-public , or a protest-public. In one
particular instance, we compared news media reportings of a specific street
protest event, a demonstration by French farmers in Milau, France, in 2001, with
the ways the protest was presented on the Web. We found that what looked like
“a bunch of angry farmers and protest tourists” to Dutch newspaper journalists
present on the scene, took on a very different guise when we approached the
event via the Web. There we found a network of highly coordinated groups –
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organizing, info-sharing and doing issue-work on the Internet. 9 The issuenetwork on the Web presented the protest as part of a larger campaign against
the U.S. ban on the import of French Roquefort cheese, and the pressure that
the World Trade Organisation exerted on the French government to relax its
protectionist agricultural policies. In this respect, issue-networks on the Web
may disclose the work of articulation and organisation — the formatting of
issues, the mobilization of actors, and the preparation of events — that enables
and/or announces a public’s eventual ‘coming out’ (whether it is on tv, during
election time, or at a protest event, et cetera). However, in the case study of
the Milau farmers protest, the presence of a public in the streets provided a
starting points for tracing the issue-network which could be said to have
organised this public, on the Web. But how to determine on the basis of the
issue-network present on the Web, whether it has organized a public, or may do
so in the future?
Looking for a way to conceptualize publics organised by networks, one of
us turned to the work of the American philosopher John Dewey. As others have
also noted, his concept of “the public” is particularly relevant in the context of
the Internet.10 In his one and one work on political philosophy, The Public and Its
Problems (1927), John Dewey defined the public as a set of actors jointly
affected by a problem, for which no existing institution or community is
currently providing a settlement. In these cases, Dewey proposed, affected
actors organise into a public, so as to assure that the problem is adressed. 11
Drawing from Dewey, we may approach issue-networks on the Web, as disclosing
such an assemblage of actors jointly implicated in an issue that no instance is
effectively taking care of. We then say that issue-networking, as we can follow it
on the Web, can be approached as a way for affected actors to get organized
around an issue, and vice versa, for actors to organise the issue, so as to assure
its settlement. As a way of finding out whether and how issue-networks may
organise publics, we may thus start by posing these type of questions : does
the issue-network provide a means for actors to get involved in defining the
issue by which they are affected? Do the issue-definitions provided by the
network help to articulate the problems in which actors are implicated ? And
lastly, in what ways may the involvement of affected actors and the articulation
of the issue by the issue-network, contribute to the issue’s settlement?
9
Richard Rogers and Noortje Marres, "French scandals on the Web, and on the streets: A small experiment
in stretching the limits of reported reality," Asian Journal of Social Science, 30, 2, 2002, pp. 339-353.
10 Stephen Coleman and John Gotze, Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation, Hansard
Society, London, 2001, pp. 5-7
11 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, Athens, 1991 (1927) For a
discussion of this book, see the piece by Noortje Marres elsewhere in this book
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4 . Following the (dis)organization of publics on the Web .
With respect to the involvement of affected actors in the issue-network, we
wish to foreground here the constraints on bringing this about, as they can be
gleaned from the Web. In many of the issue-networks we have located on the
Web, the actors that are part of the issue-network, and those that are affected
by the issue in question do not coincide. The nodes of issue-networks on the
Web, URLs that have been identified by Issue Crawler, we call ‘carriers of the
issue’. The parties affected by the affair in question, as identified by the issuenetwork, we refer to as the issue’s subjects. We found a particularly clear case
of divergence between the issue’s carriers and its subjects, in our research on
networks on the Web thematizing the issues of the Ferghana Valley, a region in
Central Asia, which lies on the borders between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan. With the help people familiar with the Central Asian issue-space, and
assisted by Issue Crawler, we managed to locate several networks on the Web
disclosing the Ferghana Valley’s issues (see figure 2) : an Uzbek governmental
network, an Uzbek media network, an international media network, and a
network of international organisations. Of organisations active in the region
itself, however, we managed to locate little more than their names and adresses
on the Web. Moreover, the network of international organisations thematizing
the Ferghana Valley on the Web provides by far the most detailed accounts of
the issues troubling the region (they provided information on border conflicts,
drug trafficking, ethnic tensions, islamic fundamentalism, poverty and women’s
issues, among others.) Also, we observed that in the case of the Ferghana
Valley, which spreads out accross countries with semi-dictatorial political
regimes, it would obviously be a mistake to expect the issue-networks we
located on the Web, to draw affected actors from the region into the issuenetwork : considering the political situation the people of the Ferghana Valley
find themselves in, such attempts would probably rather compromise than
enable the chances of Ferghana Valley’s issues being adressed.
Rather than asking whether affected parties are present in the issuenetwork, when it comes to issues like those of the Ferghana Valley, a better
question is whether issue-networks on the Web can be said to mediate the
concerns of affected parties, and in that sense organise these as a public. The
crucial question is then whether the issue-definitions provided by the issuenetwork’s capture the issues as affected parties (would) define them. We have
not been able to answer this question for the Ferghana Valley, but in another
case we have studied, this question took centerstage. In the network which has
configured on the Web around the issue of electro-hydraulic dams in the
Narmada Valley in Northern India, we found a troubling disparity between the
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isseu-definitions provided by the carriers of the issue and those provided by the
issue’s subjects. With Web pages dealing with the Narmada dams serving as
starting points, Issue Crawler located an issue-network which consisted a
grassroots movement active in the region, international civil society
organisations, and international institutions, such as the World Comission on
Dams, among others (see figure 3). The page of the regional NGO, narmada.org,
provides updates on the continuing submergence of villages, and the continuing
absence of arrangements for resettlement and compensation for the affected
population, going back to at least 2001. The international organisations present
in the issue-network, on the other hand, provide information on dams all over
the world, and present their mission in decidely global terms. For instance, the
mission statement of the World Commission on Dams says its task is “to review
the development effectiveness of large dams and to develop internationally
acceptable criteria, guidelines and standards for large dams.” 12 In some crucial
respects, the issue-definitions of the international issue-carriers and the regional
one fail to meet up. Where the latter focus on basic arrangements of
resettlement and compensation of affected populations, the former are
dedicated to monitoring “development effectiveness.” This situation is
particularly troubling considering the pivotal role that grassroots protests
against the Narmada dams have played in turning “large dams” into an issue of
global concern. The protest by Indian NGO’s and their diasporic counter-parts in
the United States, back in 1997, was the single most important occasion for
international NGO’s and institutions to get involved in the issue of large dams.13
However, even if “large dams” can now count on a large public of nongovernmental organisations, UN bodies and other international instances, the
issue of resettlement and compensation of affected populations in the Narmada
Valley remains largely unadressed up to this day. Here, one could say, the
organisation of a global public brought along a redefinition of the issue, which
fails to capture the issue definition that sparked this process in the first place.
Perhaps it is too soon to tell, but the organisation of a public may here have
resulted in the desertion of the issue by this public.
However, it is certainly not the case that the re-configuration of an issuenetwork — the involvement of previously unimplicated actors in the issue, and
related shifts in the issue’s definition — should necessarily result in the desertion
of the issue. To the contrary. In the case of the issue of climate change, we
http://www.dams.org/commission/intro.htm
The World Commission on Dams mentioned hereabove, was founded largely in response to that event.
Its succesor is the Dams and Development Project of UNEP http://www.unep-dams.org/ For a history of
the controversy surrounding the Narmada dams, see S. Randeria, “Glocalization of Law: Environmental
Justice, World Bank, and the Cunning State in India,” Current Sociology, Vol. 15, no. 3/4, Sage Publications,
London/Thousand Oaks, May/July, 2003, pp. 305 – 328.
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found that the broadening of the range of actors involved in the issue-network
beyond an original ‘core set’ precisely opened up opportunities to bring the
issue closer to a settlement. In the spring of 2004, we located a climate changenetwork on the Web, in which were present not only long time carriers of this
issue, but also actors we hadn’t previously encountered in issue-networks on
climate change : besides Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth International, the
network presented NGO’s working on the issue of ‘international financial
institutions’ (IFIs), and such an istitution itself, the World Bank (see Figure 4).
Surfing this network, we observed that the issue of climate change was being
inserted in a controversy surrounding the World Bank’s policy on the funding of
fossil fuel projects in developing countries. Refering to climate change, this
network articulated a particular claim, that the World Bank phase out its funding
of fossil fuel projects by 2008, and shift its funding to support renewable
energy sources. This network definitively presented a shift away from climate
change networks we had located on the Web over the past year. Not only were
NGO’s working on IFI’s drawn into the climate change-network (or the other way
around). Climate change, in this network, was articulated as an issue to be
adressed by an international development agency, the World Bank. Climate
change in recent years was defined, most importantly, by the Kyoto protocol
(and by criticism of the protocol), and the UN figured as the principal adressee
of the issue. Now the energy policies of an international financial institution
came singled out as a key site where the issue’s fate may be decided. However,
the re-definition of the issue in this case, certainly has not disabled previous
issue definitions and their publics. As part of the controversy over the energy
policy of the World Bank, this institution reconfirmed its commitment to the
Kyoto protocol. And so did the European Commission, we learned from the
issue-network on the Web, during a European Council meeting on the above
demands made at the adress of the World Bank. The insertion of climate change
in the controversy over the Bank’s energy policy, we could perhaps say, added a
new public to those already organised around the issue, and provided an
opportunity for actors already implicated in the issue, to re-actualize the issue.
5 . Conclusion
Many more aspects of issue-networking should be seriously looked at if we really
are to put the Web to use to account for the (dis)organisation of issues and
their publics, and do justice to the ways in which the fates of issues and publics
intertwine. Among others, we should look much more carefully at how the
political-geographical locations of issues constrain their articulation, as well as
the organisation of a public. In the case of the Ferghana Valley, the issues were
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most notably being defined by international networks, at a great distance from
the sites where the issues being articulated by this network were making
themselves felt. At the same time, the type of issues that arise in situations in
which even the definition of problems proves a dangereous undertaking are
among the ones which most urgently require adress, and thus, a public that may
attempt to assure this. Also, we should spend much more time looking into the
enabling and disabling effects of various framings of an issue for the
organisation of its public, and for the possibility of it being adressed. For
example, the framing of an issue in terms of ‘development,’ as happened in the
case of the Narmada dams, but also in that of climate change, may have farreaching consequences for the type of public that gets organised around the
issue. It may have consequences, for instance, for the ways in which actors in
the North and actors in the South may relate to one and other in their capacity
of members in these issues’ publics Lastly, there is the enormuous question of
how issue-networking and the organisation of public around the issue
contributes or not to the issue’s adress. This question we have barely begun to
inquire into.
But we have come some way. Looking for “public debate” on the Web, we
found ‘issue-networks.’ On the Web, we catch glimpes of the net-work of
formatting issues and organising actors, that must be performed before
something like a public may come to get involved in an issue, be it in the mode
of debate, or that of protest, or yet another way. Secondly, we no longer have
to approach issue-networking as an activity that is inevitably pursued in the
absence of ‘the public.’ We may give issue-networks credit, but also hold them
accountable, for the ways in which they organise and fail to organise an issue’s
public. We may do so by following the configuration and re-configuration of
issue-networks in the widely accessible medium of the Web. First, these
networks can be queried for the extent to which they involve affected actors in
the articulation of the issue. Secondly, we may determine to what degree the
network’s issue-definitions capture the ways in which actors are affected by it.
And lastly, we can ask whether the articulation of the issue, and the organisation
of a public in the issue-network contribute to the issue being adressed. As the
above discussion of our Web findings make clear, we frequently observe the
failure of issue-networks to organise a public for the issue that they have
adopted. However, some of the issue-networks we located on the Web, like the
one around climate change, did contribute to the organisation of actors affected
by the issue into collective. Moreover, its articulations of the issue may turn out
to be decisive to bringing the issue closer to a settlement. Such rare
achievements make clear, it seems to us, that the frequent failures of issuenetworks to call a public into being can not be ascribed to the instrinsic
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features of the ‘issue-network,’ as a form of political organisation, as the
inventor of this concept, Hugh Heclo, did. Instead, by locating and querying
issue-networks on the Web, we may specify the constraints on the organisation
of an issue’s public, and thus begin to see the contours of this challenge.
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